24 Public Organization Heads Resign

Resignations of CEOs at 24 public corporations affiliated with the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, including the Korea Electric Power Corp., will be processed and public recruitment for those positions will begin next week.

Rim Che-min, vice minister for knowledge, held a press conference at the Gwacheon Government Complex yesterday and said, “We’re planning to proceed with resignations of 24 public corporation CEOs whose terms are coming to an end or who expressed their will to resign, and appoint their successors through public recruitment.”

He said, “All major public corporations will post recruitment advertisements next week. As public recruiting normally takes 45 to 55 days, the recruiting procedure will be completed by the end of June.”

There are a total of 69 public organizations affiliated with the ministry, six and 22 of which are major public corporations and semi-government organizations, respectively. The president or the minister is responsible for appointing heads of those 28 organizations.

The remaining 41 organizations include subsidiaries of public corporations.

The knowledge ministry is planning to speed up processing the resignations of the 24 public organization heads who already expressed their will to step down.

However, CEOs of the Korea Gas Safety Corp., the Korea Nuclear Energy Foundation and the Korea Institute of Design Promotion have not submitted their resignations. As for the Korea Elevator Safety Institute, the ministry will wait for the transfer of operation among related divisions to be completed.

“Anyone, including former bureaucrats or current CEOs at public organizations, can apply to the public recruiting. For CEO posts at major public corporations, we’ll make sure that the most qualified are recruited by receiving recommendations from headhunters, the academia or organizations,” said the vice minister.

Moreover, the ministry decided to include the Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power, which is not one of the major public corporations but is large in size, in the list of organizations to be reshuffled. It will also recruit a CEO for the Korea Trade Promotion Agency again, as none of the three candidates on the shortlist was appointed to the position.

changkim@donga.com